Sublime

Most of the time, the power of fate played on like a quiet and monotonous ground bass, coloring only the edges of his life. Rarely was he reminded of its existence.

Next to it was an untouched Scotch and soda. Its bubbles were dead. Stewart Buntline wasn't forty yet. He was the best looking man in town, a cross, somebody once said, between Cary Grant and a German shepherd. On his lean midsection lay a fifty-seven-dollar book, a railroad atlas of the Civil War, which his wife had given to him. That was his only

the original battle messenger’s course, which started in Marathon and went to Athens.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.